Wireless communications networks are widely deployed to provide various communication services such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, and the like. These wireless networks may be multiple-access networks capable of supporting multiple users by sharing the available network resources.
A wireless communication network may include a number of network devices such as access points (APs) and/or base stations or Node-Bs that can support communication for a number of wireless devices. A wireless device may communicate with a network device bidirectionally. For example, in cellular networks, a user equipment (UE) may communicate with a base station via downlink and uplink. The downlink (or forward link) refers to the communication link from the base station to the UE, and the uplink (or reverse link) refers to the communication link from the UE to the base station. A similar form of communication may occur between a wireless device (e.g., station or STA) and an access point in a wireless local area network (WLAN).
In WLANs, for example, the access point may send data to at least one client device in the form of one or more frames. To reduce power consumption, a client device may operate in a low power consumption mode (e.g., a sleep mode) in some circumstances, such as when the client device is not being used for communication with the access point. In other circumstances, however, reducing the power consumption of the client device may prove challenging because the bandwidth of the signals received by the client device (e.g., signals carrying frames) may not be known. In those cases, such as during a listening mode or an active receive/transmit mode, for example, additional mechanisms may be needed to reduce power consumption. Moreover, similar mechanisms may also be needed for wireless devices used in cellular networks (e.g., UEs).